e old
shiny Colt's forty-five, with its worn leather "Texas style" holster,
became a bedroom ornament.

Thus, from a frontiersman dropped Senor Johnson to the status of a
property owner. In a general way he had to attend to his interests
before the cattlemen's association; he had to arrange for the buying
and shipping, and the rest was leisure. He could now have gone away
somewhere as far as time went. So can a fish live in trees--as far as
time goes. And in the daily riding, riding, riding over the range he
found the opportunity for abstract thought which the frontier life had
crowded aside.

CHAPTER TWO

THE SHAPES OF ILLUSION

Every day, as always, Senor Johnson rode abroad over the land. His
surroundings had before been accepted casually as a more or less
pertinent setting of action and condition. Now he sensed some of the
fascination of the Arizona desert.

He noticed many things before unnoticed. As he jingled loosely along
on his cow-horse, he observed how the animal waded fetlock deep in the
gorgeous orange California poppies, and then he looked up and about,
and saw that the rich colour carpeted the landscape as far as his eye
could reach, so that it seemed as though he could ride on and on
through them to the distant Chiricahuas. Only, close under the hills,
lay, unobtrusive, a narrow streak of grey. And in a few hours he had
reached the streak of grey, and ridden out into it to find himself the
centre of a limitless alkali plain, so that again it seemed the valley
could contain nothing else of importance.

Looking back, Senor Johnson could discern a tenuous ribbon of
orange--the poppies. And perhaps ahead a little shadow blotted the
face of the alkali, which, being reached and entered, spread like fire
until it, too, filled the whole plain, until it, too, arrogated to
itself the right of typifying Soda Springs Valley as a shimmering
prairie of mesquite. Flowered upland, dead lowland, brush, cactus,
volcanic rock, sand, each of these for the time being occupied the
whole space, broad as the sea. In the circlet of the mountains was
room for many infinities.

Among the foothills Senor Johnson, for the first time, appreciated
colour. Hundreds of acres of flowers filled the velvet creases of the
little hills and washed over the smooth, rounded slopes so accurately
in the placing and manner of tinted shadows that the mind had
difficulty in believing the colour not to have been shaded in